There are significant business and tactical advantages that can make it worthwhile for a startup company to file for a U.S. patent application on its business method invention, despite the current chaos in the U.S. Patent Office and the courts on the legal parameters for patenting business methods. For more ...

Title Guaranty in downtown Honolulu is currently looking for a couple of Software Developers! Ideal candidate would have a minimum of 2 years of experience with .NET, C#, ASP.net, Microsoft SQL Server and SSRS.

The H-1B visa is commonly known as the Professional Worker's Visa and has been heavily used in the finance and tech industries as a tool for recruiting top international talent into information technology, software engineering and other specialized jobs in the information economy. A recent article in the New York Times, headlined "Large…

It used to be that to develop with Microsoft technologies developers would have to pay up for development tools if they wanted the best experience. These days with all the options developers have, getting someone to pay for tools can be difficult.

Recently I wiped of one of my development machines and realized this is no longer the case while installing various tools.

It's well known that Microsoft has been moving towards open sourcing many of their projects like…

Sooner or later, everyone who is in the tech field for the long run bumps up against the U.S. immigration system. The tech talent pool is global, our engineering schools have plenty of international grads looking to be placed into U.S. jobs, and smart international investors are looking for U.S. tech entrepreneurs to back. And the unanimous reaction to the immigration encounter is “the U.S. immigration system really sucks!”

We’re celebrating our having picked up two more engagements in June, for the States of Georgia and Oklahoma, with a tip of the hat to Andrew Hoppin (NuCivic.com) who, several years ago, got me focused on a business model based on long distance, distributed project teams. Justin, of course, continues to do the heavy lifting.

Lately I’ve been reviewing issues of long distance worker health and safety, and of information security with respect to access to corporate information from the…

Hi TechHui! I wanted to let you know that HTDC has an RFP out, looking for business mentors on Maui, Hawaii Island, and Kauai, to help small businesses grow as well as to represent HTDC. If you are interested, please check out the RFP. Please forward to anyone you think might be interested as well! Last chance to ask questions regarding…

Recently I’ve been interested in games created using JavaScript. JavaScript is everywhere and works with a lot of devices and platforms including mobile devices that run on iOS, Android, Windows and FirefoxOS. On the web seems that games using HTML and JavaScript have started to replace those using older technologies like Flash. Here is a list of JavaScript libraries that I have seen recommended for creating games. To compile this list I looked at libraries that are free,…

I like to hone my problem-solving skills by going over some programming contest questions and I also like to use programming contest problems in interviews because it allows me to gauge whether the candidate is a just a coder or a problem solver. That's not to say that if you can't come up with a correct solution, you aren't a problem solver -- if I'm the interviewer, I'm more interested in how you approach the problem and whether you can break up and present the problem in an abstract…

We work on long distance projects from home offices. We should have invested in solar years ago. Now Hawaii Electric is telling us we'll have no power as they replace telephone poles in our area. We're scrambling to find a place with access to the Internet from where we can participate in Skype and GoToMeeting scrums. Any ideas?

In my last blog post I wrote about Windows 10 preview for phones. Yesterday Microsoft released the latest technical preview for Windows 10 on desktops, build 10061. With the rumored end of July release date of Windows 10 here is a look at where Windows 10 is today. The current build is the most refined one yet, but is still very buggy and hopefully…

Say you are writing a web app that will help its users optimize their companies' online marketing. In that case your web app would need to be able to access its users google analytics web site data. The way you allow your site users to authorize your web app to to access their google analytics data, is with Oauth2. Oauth2 is a security protocol for third party application authorization. When a user visits your web app, you present them with a link that will take them to a google page…

I stood at a crossroads as a junior in college. Organic Chemistry had destroyed any hope I had of going to medical school. I had declared Biology as my major, but I began to have second thoughts. I fell back on the thing I was good at, which was Mathematics. Still, I wasn’t sure what I would do with that degree.…

Having worked on many software projects written in C#, I've come to prefer certain conventions when creating the architecture of a C# project. In this highly opinionated blog post, I will share these personal preferences, which I hope may be of some value to the reader.

Single Solution, Multiple Projects

If possible, I prefer not to hunt down projects that ultimately make up the product. If a product is a collection of projects, then I think this should be bundled as a Visual…

We (v257 LLC) picked up some new assignments this month with Justin leading projects for our business partner, NuCivic, in a collaboration with IBM and the World Bank. We’re managing the development of Open Data web sites for the governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia. And we’re managing another project to enhance an Open Source software package that’s used on the …

When I first started learning Ruby on Rails back in 2007, one thing was made clear: don’t even try setting it up on a Windows machine. Since then, we had some open source projects likeRailsInstallerthat make it really easy to set up a development environment on your machine. Also, with the advent of virtual machines…

People who know me know that I’ve been pretty busy lately. People who really know me know that I’m actually slammed. Yet, I’m taking a personal challenge to complete a small application in the month of March. As it turns out, I have an idea for a small bite-sized application that I can build in a month. It’s also a great chance to challenge myself to learn new frameworks and libraries.